Links

June 17, 2011 | Author | 1 Comments

My two boys are enthusiastic fans of the Scooby-Doo cartoons. I have to admit, the shows are pretty fun, even if wildly predictable. A typical episode runs along the following lines: the gang is enjoying a tour of a newly opened amusement park, when a terrifying monster or ghost appears out of nowhere, causing all the patrons to run for the hills. But of course, our friends are too smart to be fooled by this trick, and so they begin their investigations. After some crazy shenanigans they eventually determine that the monster or ghost is really old Mr. Peabody, who previously owned the land that the park now sits on, and therefore wants to see it go bankrupt. And of course, he would have gotten away with it, if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids!  

It strikes me that the Mystery Gang, when confronted with these unusual phenomena, always assumes there is a natural explanation. With the possible exception of Scooby and Shaggy, there’s never a point at which the characters reveal a concern that ghosts or monsters might actually be real. To be fair, I would have the same reaction in these scenarios. But I think a subtle message, however unintentional, is being communicated in these episodes. Of course, in the normal flow of events, natural explanations typically exhaust all the possibilities. But there's no reason to think this is always the case, and Christianity, among other religions, provides the rationale for maintaining such a tentative stance.

Naturalists believe that physical events can only be explained by appealing to other such physical events. Or to put it differently, the universe is a closed system, and nothing outside the system can be used to explain what’s going on here. Sometimes this attitude has been justified by appealing to what philosophers call the “causal closure of the physical” principle, which states that no physical event has a cause outside the physical domain. What most naturalists don’t realize about this attitude, however, is that it represents a philosophical claim about the physical world, and therefore is just as fallible as any other philosophical theory.   

But if some brand of naturalism is true, the implications for the Christian faith are immense, to say the least.  Among other things, we’d be required to embrace a “Scooby-Doo Epistemology,” in which everything must ultimately be explained in natural terms. Do human beings have a soul? Nope, the soul is just the brain and its various bio-chemical states. Can miracles occur? Not if there are no exceptions to the uniformity of physical laws. What about the after life? Well, if a human being is merely a physical creature, then when the body dies, it’s unlikely that it continues to exist beyond this world. And so on.

I’m teaching a course in modern philosophy this summer. Recently we discussed these very issues, in response to our reading of Descartes. The underlying question is simple: what is a human being? Above all, I want my students to understand what’s at stake in how this question is answered. For I believe that there is a direct connection between how we view human beings and the amount of value we place upon them. Or to use philosophical language, it’s impossible to separate our metaphysics from our ethics. The reality is that if the foundation is cracked, everything might eventually come tumbling down.

This coming fall at MacLaurin, we’ll be addressing these pivotal issues (and more) as we explore our annual theme, “Persons, Bodies, and the Imago Dei.” I encourage you to join this most important conversation!

David Leonard, Minneapolis

David recently completed his Ph.D. in philosophy, and teaches a wide range of courses at several universities in the Twin Cities. In addition to his teaching duties, he owns the website “Redeeming Culture,” where he blogs regularly about the link between Christianity and contemporary society. He is currently writing a book on the doctrine of vocation entitled, Answering the Call: Faith, Work, and the Pursuit of Happiness. David will be co-leading a MacLaurin reading group this fall looking at Pope John Paul II’s, Theology of the Body.

Post a Comment

COMMENTS